 Today, I'm happy to be having a conversation with Dr. David Younger. He's a licensed psychologist as well as a therapist and we're going to be talking about deep and lasting mental and emotional change. So David, great to have you here. Thank you, George. Great to be here. So let me first read your bio and so people can have some sense of your background and then we'll get right into this interesting conversation. So David is a licensed psychologist, trained couples and group therapist and is currently training to be a mindfulness and meditation teacher. And David, who's who's who are you training with? Jack Cornfield and Tara Brock. Yes. I like them. Yeah. Yeah. So continuing on with your bio. David has a private practice that is 100% video and film based with clients from all over the world. David has created two websites that you might be interested in. One is called love after kids. So it's love after kids.com, which is for supporting individuals and couples with their relationships as they're raising their children. It's just often challenging to keep their relationships strong. David has also created a website called chronic, chronic illness therapy. So chronic illness therapy.com, yes, chronic illness therapy.com. And the purpose of that site is to support people who are living with chronic health conditions. David lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, two kids and a dog. So welcome, David. Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here talking with you. Yeah. So, and we didn't even mention your your psychotherapy site. So we could put that in there. I'll put it in the notes of the video if you would like. So you had, you know, you sent me a couple of notes that we wanted to talk about. One thing was the parable of the two arrows. Yeah. Yeah. This is, that is my favorite, it's a Buddhist teaching and it's my favorite Buddhist teaching. I feel like it is the foundation for my own personal spiritual practice as well as my work with other people. And it's actually, it's quite simple. And so basically it's that the first arrow is what life slings at us. Things that we can't control. Things that cause us pain like illness, loss, you know, breaking up a relationship. And there are things that can cause us a lot of pain, but they don't kill us. It's that the second arrow is one that we actually shoot at ourselves. And the second arrow is encompasses all of our reactions to the first arrow, all of the anxiety, the projections, what's going to happen. I don't like this. I don't want to feel this way. And it's the second arrow that makes the pain unbearable. And it's the second arrow that we have control over. We can't control, you know, when we lose someone, obviously. But, you know, we can control, we do have control over our minds. And often we're not aware that we have that control or we don't feel like we do. But it's the second arrow that we can do something about, that we can stop firing. And I just, you know, obviously you don't have to be a Buddhist, too. I'm not a Buddhist. I love a lot of Buddhist philosophy and teaching. But that's really, to me, the most profound teaching that exists. So I don't know if I've ever talked about that with you. Yeah, we haven't yet. And, oh, give me just a second here. Yeah, you know, so this may be related. Tell me what you think of this. I recently kind of stumbled upon, I don't know how this came to me. But I stumbled upon this way of dealing with any kind of physical pain that I experience. And I'm grateful that I don't have, you know, a chronic illness or something where I have to deal with a lot of it. So maybe this is a gentle way to start for me to start. But it's like, if I have a physical pain, I reframe it as this pain is actually, the sensation I'm experiencing is actually a signal of healing. Now, obviously, scientifically, that may or may not be true. The pain could literally signal something breaking down. But I, you know, this is not medical advice. But it's like, for me, it's like, I know it well enough where it's like, OK, it's not a big deal, this particular pain or whatever. It's like, oh, this is a signal of healing. And just by reframing it that way, it's like the sensation is healing. Like every sensation is healing me. It's weird, like I've just been able to cope a lot better with random pains here and there. And it's just, yeah. Anyway, so I thought that was an interesting way to apply these two arrows. Yeah, absolutely. Because what you're referring to is you're talking about your relationship to the pain and you're actually engaging in that relationship and saying, well, I have this habitual relationship to my pain, which is, oh, I'm in pain. I don't like this. No one likes pain, right? But if you start to think about the nuances of the pain and what is this, what is it trying to do? What is it trying to tell me? Whether, you know, maybe it's not, but it's maybe it's not true literally that it means that your body is healing every time you're in pain. But your body is doing something. It's trying to communicate something to you. And it's really worth sort of slowing down and paying attention and thinking about what it is that you're the nature of that relationship. So I think that's exactly what this is about. Yeah, that's awesome. But you're talking about more like the life events that all of us have disappointments, discouragements. I mean, in business, this is very common to launch something. And it's like, oh, it didn't go as quite what our fantasy imagined. But then we could beat ourselves up over that. So this second arrow, we can stop. So if we stop the second arrow, or how can we, first of all, how can we stop the second arrow? But secondly, now that we don't fire it, you're still the first arrow that has been shot. Well, first of all, I mean, it's not like we stop the second arrow and then we never fire it again. This is a practice that you will continue to do for your whole life because our minds, if left unchecked, are going to be firing those arrows constantly. So you don't have to worry about even that question of what happens when we're no longer firing the second arrow. Because the practice is, again, it's not to focus on the things that we can't control. It's about focusing on the things that we can. So basically what it boils down to the second arrow is about, and this is, again, borrowing from Buddhism, but grasping an aversion. That's what the second arrow is all about, is that something happens. And if it's pleasant, we usually want it to continue. And we want to latch on to it. And we want it to keep going for as long as possible. And if it's negative, we want to get rid of it as quickly as possible. And this makes the unpleasantness persist. And it makes it feel like a state versus just something that's actually inherently very temporary. There's a woman, Jill Boldetailer. Have you ever heard of her? She wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. Yes, it was My Stroke of Insight. She had this huge TED talk and it's been a couple of years since I've watched it. Yeah, so there's a quote I'd love to read from that. She said, when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body. After that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body, which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds, you can watch the process happening. You can feel it happening and then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that's resulting in you having this physiological response over and over again. And that's just another way of framing this, is that we're constantly having thoughts and feelings and no one has a blank mind that we all have those thoughts and feelings. And the point of mindfulness, the point of meditation practice is not to not have thoughts and feelings. It's to establish a different relationship to your thoughts and feelings, to stop identifying with them, to be able to start observing them. And so here's another. This is an acronym that I find really helpful to continue with this theme that's called RAIN. So the R stands for recognize. So something's happening in the moment and it's about recognizing, oh, I'm feeling upset, I'm feeling sad, or this just happened in my external environment. That's the R. It's just recognizing what happens. The A is about accepting. This is happening right now. There's nothing I can do about it because it's already happened. So this is just what's happening in the moment. The I is investigating with compassion. And the compassion is key here. And the investigation, it's not a cerebral investigation. It's more about stepping back, pausing, and saying, OK, am I feeling this anywhere in my body? What's going on? What am I feeling? So you're pausing and you're just taking a moment to investigate how what has happened is impacting. And the N is both nurturing and non-identification. And the nurturing is about, again, extending the compassion and saying, kind of, you can mantra like this too, like this too is happening. And it's OK. And I can be with this. And the NINA identification is just about, this is just a thought or a feeling. It's not me. This is not forever. Nothing lasts forever. And so R, recognize, A, accept. I investigate with compassion and nurturing and non-identification. And so I mentioned Jill Balti Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight. Tara Brock's book, Radical Acceptance. You can read about this. It's an awesome book. So I would say Rain and the two arrows are definitely the two of the definitely the most important pieces of foundation for work that you can start doing. None of this is quick fix stuff. And it's going to be, there are going to be a lot of ebbs and flows ups and downs. And it's not about being perfect. It's not about, you don't reach a point where you stop shooting the second hour like I said before. It's just, it's a practice that you can develop. And working with a teacher, a coach, a therapist is can be really helpful, especially because stuff can come up. And we all need help in navigating those waters. That's awesome, awesome. So I'm going to focus a little bit on the investigation with compassion. Say more about that. Yeah, what is, what is, yeah, say more about invest. How do we investigate with compassion? So if we're investigating in a judgmental way, I'll say, I'll start off by talking about how we don't investigate. Actually, let's use a real example. Let's say that somebody is really excited about I have online courses and I teach people on this stuff and people launch online courses all day long. But it's like, let's say someone launches an online course and not as many people bought it as they hoped. And so let's run through this rain thing. How can we apply that? It's like R, right? I guess recognizing, OK, so this is what's happened. This is happening. Like this is people, I had these expectations, these high expectations, and they weren't met. And A would be to accept that. OK, so that's what happened for this launch, that this is this. And so now we're down to the I. How do we investigate with compassion? So it starts with really pausing. And again, it's about what am I feeling in response to what happened? And it's not about judging it or saying, you should or shouldn't feel this or if you find yourself. But for example, part of what you're feeling is shame. Then it's just about naming shame. And what's underneath the shame sadness? And where are you feeling the sadness? Well, I'm feeling it in my stomach. I'm feeling a tightness in my chest. And can you breathe into that pain, into that tension? Can you send love to that? Which is actually a good segue into another related piece here, the loving kindness. And I feel like just since I've been naming key people in books, Sharon Salzburg wrote a book called Loving Kindness. She's kind of a loving kindness guru. And this is, again, a very simple practice that you can direct toward yourself, toward your loved ones, toward people that are just neutral in your life, and toward difficult people. And you can come up with your own three or four statements that you can just practice every day for five minutes and repeat over again. And you can cater it to whatever it is that you need. So may I be kind to myself? May I forgive myself? May I be healthy? May I be happy? And it seems, again, all these concepts when you talk about it are elusive in their simplicity. But they're things that people just don't put into practice. And the power of putting these things into practice is just, it's incomprehensible, the power. Because one of the most common things if not the most common thing that I deal with in my practice is our people's punitive voices. Meaning the judgment, the inner critic. It's like people have such high expectations, unfair expectations for themselves. Often starting, we internalize them from when we're very young. That's how we're related to when we're young and we develop, we internalize these voices. And they often just go unchecked. And so when something happens, when our course doesn't perform to our expectation, that it's perfect fodder for that punitive voice to pop in and be like, oh, you suck. What's wrong with you? How could you do that? You should give up. All of that negativity. And it's just so important to challenge and to put that punitive voice in its place. Otherwise, it will run the show. And most people that I work with come to me that their punitive voices are running the show. Yeah, totally. It's like our brains are more likely to attach onto negativity, isn't it? Than positivity. It's easier to just keep giving power, giving energy to those negative voices and seeing evidence of, oh, yes. So negative voices are true. Look, look, this happened. Look, that other thing happened. So you talked about being aware of those negative voices. And then how do we step back? How do we step back from those negative voices? So the awareness is a key first step because so many people, when they're not aware, they're completely identified with their punitive voice. There's no separation between the eye that is observing and the punitive voice that is this internalized voice that's pumping up. So it starts by just recognizing, oh, I see you. And what I encourage people to do often is to engage with them like the Buddha did with Mara when he was in the process of attaining enlightenment, who was the shadow side who was just challenging him. And the Buddha invited Mara to tea. So if you can think about, what if I were to invite this punitive voice to tea? Some people like to name it. Some people can see directly, oh, I know this is my dad. So they can engage with it that way. But saying to it, all right, what have you got to say? And if you don't have anything constructive to say that's going to be helpful, then shut up. Then sit down. And let me know when you have something useful to say. But again, it's not like all this other stuff. It's not a one and done type thing. It's a practice, and it's incredibly challenging. And this is another example of when working with a therapist can be really helpful, especially if you are just inundated with the critical voice. Yeah, awesome. And how can people start to work with you, David, if someone says, OK, great, let's give it a try. What's the next? Well, one step to do is to go to a lot of my blog posts are on Love After Kids. Now, I haven't been doing, having mostly guest posts in the past year, I've done some myself. But as the site has gotten more popular in large part thanks to my work with you, there have been a lot more people reaching out to do guest posting. And that combined with just my mom died a year, a little over a year ago. And that's not where my heart has been. But I have plenty of blog posts on Love After Kids. And so one way to do it is to go and read some of my posts and get a feel for me there. And you can just reach out. You can send me an email. You can call. And then the next step would be for us to have an initial consultation. I think I told you that anyone who is a client of yours who sees this video who is interested in working together, I'd be happy to offer a free initial consultation. And that's another good way to see if we'd be a good fit. So read some posts, send me an email, and I'll get back to you and we'll take you from there. Wonderful. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate this conversation. I expect it will be nurturing and really, it's worth reflecting on anyway. And so that next time, well, today, when the self-critical voices are coming or if something happens externally, that is not what we wanted. We can use some of these tools we've talked about. So thank you so much, David. And if anyone is interested, be sure to contact David. I'll put his contact info in the notes of the video. And as he mentioned, if you are watching this, you're part of my audience. David is welcoming you, if you're interested, possibly working with him, to reach out to him for a free initial 30-minute consult. All right, thanks so much, David. Thank you, George.